1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a ticketing system; and more particularly, to a digital ticketing system for use in conjunction with a mobile phone or terminal.
2. Description of Related Art
There are many different known ways to provide a ticket to allow someone to gain access to an event or location. One known way is to distribute a physical ticket having the time and place of the event printed thereon. The ticket is typically handed to a gate attendant when someone enters the premise at which the event is being held. However, the known physical tickets have several problems associated with them, including: 1) They cannot be delivered digitally. In other words, it is impossible to deliver tickets remotely. 2) It is hard to check whether the known ticket is a stolen ticket in most cases, e.g. movie ticket. 3) It is hard to do digital management for the tickets. 4) The physical ticket wastes a lot of paper.
More recently, digital tickets have been developed and are now being used, including the use of the same in mobile phones or terminals. A digital ticket is a certificate that guarantees certain rights for the ticket owner. There are many applications for digital tickets, which include, e.g., an electronic stamp, an electronic coupon or a voucher. But most digital tickets are merely digital textual tickets in which rights of the ticket owner are described by text.
At the same time the digital ticket is becoming popular, some issues are also introduced. Digital tickets are quite suitable for delivering over networks, which makes it easy to be altered, pirated or superdistributed without any change and control. The digital copy of the ticket can be the same as the original that makes the ticket verification at redemption more difficult. Many solutions have been proposed for protecting digital tickets, but the extra protection often makes the digital ticket system too complicated, and therefore causes usability issues which impedes the digital ticket uses.
For example, in a mobile environment the digital ticket has some known problems. Mainly these are related to security issues. It is very easy to send some digital information from terminal to terminal and hence without proper security measures superdistribution of tickets is possible. Various techniques have been developed to overcome this problem. Many ticket validation systems are quite complicated and diminish the usability of such digital ticket systems.
Overall, mobile ticketing is a problem because of the copy protection issue. There are two basic known approaches in use today:
1. Mobile ticketing is now used in proprietary formats and used only with ticketing schemes with low value and low risk (e.g., SMS text based ticketing) or bar codes. This solution has a copy protection problem in that there is no protection: only the first one who is presenting the ticket gets the goods/access. This requires a cross check at the validation. Another option is that some kind of identification of the user is required in addition (e.g., phone number, drivers license). The problem is that the ticket validation should be a very fast process and this slows the process down.
2. Another alternative is to use security mechanisms for ticket validation and storage. Traditional cryptographic approaches, such as encryption/decryption, digital signature, etc., are used for protecting digital textual ticket, but it is heavy and costly for mobile devices/services as they should use the same scheme and has usability problem at the ticket redemption point because the following reasons:
a) Verification is needed when receiving the ticket.
b) Cross verification is needed during the redemption between the ticket owner device and the redemption point device.
Both of them cause extra communication and process cost. Key management is known to be a difficult task. System establishment is also very expensive. A trade-off has to be made between high security and easy usability.
In addition, the known digital tickets have several other problems, including: 1) It is easy to make an illegal copy of the known digital ticket that is impossible to validate without the help of a machine. 2) Copy protection for digital tickets is typically hard to implement, because, for example, cryptography and key handling for cryptography is complex and potentially risky or costly because it needs hardware secure elements on the terminal, etc. 3) Usability of the known digital tickets is a problem due to the complicated protection based on cryptography. 4) The known digital ticket is hard to conduct redemption/validity check, i.e. it is impossible to check/inspect by a human without machines. 5) The digital ticket makes it hard to support additional business for extra revenue. 6) The life cycle of the known digital ticket is short, and the content of the ticket is hard to renew or update after issuing (the current solution is issuing a new ticket; however, the user typically needs to delete the old ticket.)
The present invention provides a solution to the aforementioned problems in the art.